Politics

Bernard Slattery found only one worthwhile idea in The Hun’s 2020 Summit-eve reporting and Harry Clarke concluded it was a show about nothing. Mark Bahnisch thought Jackie Huggins had the toughest panel to chair. Andrew Bolt put the tattered shreds of his sanity on the line by live–blogging the proceedings. Brian Bahnisch found that Kevin Rudd’s early childhood push reduced to human-capital formation. Sinclair Davidson believes its all a sign of Kevin Rudd’s lack of substance and inner Tony Blair. Chris Berg, Pommygranate and HeathG were unimpressed, with Heath noting that the (mostly unoriginal) ideas are the easy bit, implementing them is where we needed clever thinking.

Andrew Landeryou indulges his inner Whitlamite by paying out on Malcolm Fraser, at his blog of high bandwidth consumption and poor Java scripting. 11. gilmae: Thereby completing the Malcolm-Fraser-pile-on trifecta, with solid efforts by Colebatch, Akerman and Landeryou. [↩]22. GT: Sounds more like Gladiators than horse-racing [↩]

Mercurius at LP notes the discovery of a Howard/Brough black hole33. GT: No relation to the Higgs boson [↩].

Sacha responds to assaults on property rights in favour of NSW developers. As does Terje although perhaps unsurprisingly for an ALS blogger, Terje thinks the status quo and the new laws are just different shades of tyranny. 44. gilmae: And really, the NSW government bending over backwards to assist bribe-encumbered developers? What a shock. [↩] clarencegirl is less polite than Quentin Dempster about NSW Planning Minister Frank Sartor.

International

Tim Lambert reports further developments in the story of Brian Hansford, a journalist at the New Zealand Listener, who was fired after climate change zealots55. GT: Of the denialist variety [↩] used stand over tactics on the magazine’s editor and management. Now the Listener has sooled its solicitors on the blogger who posted an account of the affair:

When you use lawyers to suppress people’s views it kind of undercuts your claims that you didn’t suppress Hansford’s views.

Japanese bloggers on About40, a hit show which targets “the late-thirties demographic of single childless Japanese women who entered the work force during the 80s bubble, captured in the newly-coined term arafo.”

… came all this way to see you

Issues analysis

David Tiley posts on media shenanigans on both sides of the Tasman, with a detailed analysis of the standoff between editor and journos at The Age newspaper, provoked in part by Jaspan’s enthusiastic promotion of “Earth Day”, and a look at the seemingly sinister influence of well funded climate change denialists in New Zealand.

Mark Bahnisch found this article, by conservative historian Tony Judt a worthwhile read. In it Judt finds that the US has learnt very little from the history of the previous century.

David Jeffery thinks our pollies are off the planet when it comes to plastic bags. Nico is quite content that the plastic bag shindig during the week ended with no ban.

Dave Bath has found another community consultation you might want to write to.

Will Wilkinson is unimpressed by Sunstein and Thaler’s new book Nudge, which seems to tout the virtues of achieving social change through engineering “default options” and a range of other modes of choice architecture. 77. KP: Why are Americans so much better than everyone else at mental masturbation? [↩].

Arts

German film festival director Lynden Barber provides some details on Hans Weingartner’s new film Reclaim Your Brain, a film centering on a television producer attempts to rig the televisions ratings system to reverse the national idiocracy arising from TV networks determination to scrape the bottom of the barrel in the pursuit of maximising audience share. (SH – Weingartner may despair, but he has never encountered the banality that is Australian commercial free-to-air television). This film is bound to provoke as much comment as its predecessor The Edukators, whichseemed to polarise audiences who were often unsettled by the ideological emptiness of the film’s main protagonists.

Alison Croggon reviews Graham Pitts’s Haneef: The Interrogation, a play based upon the leaked police interviews of Indian-born doctor Mohamed Haneef, finding the playwright’s inability to “resist the temptation to proselytise,” inevitably undermining the dramatisation of an incident upon which so much compelling material was available.

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About Ken Parish

Ken Parish is a legal academic at Charles Darwin University, with research areas in public law (constitutional and administrative law) and teaching & learning theory and practice. He has been a legal academic for almost 12 years. Before that he ran a legal practice in Darwin for 15 years and was a Member of the NT Legislative Assembly for almost 4 years in he early 1990s.

Personally, I thought ‘Australia Talks’ tonight summed up the 2020 Summit thingie rather well. The single big idea to come from the gathering is the fact that it was held at all. Would John Howard have contemplated such an event, let alone the openness with which it was held? I think not.